Divinity and Natural Philosophy in Western Science
Concepts of divinity and have invariably impacted natural philosophy throughout the history of science. This is due to the inevitable development of cosmology in any religious system of beliefs, which in turn influences how societies across time elucidate natural phenomena. Beginning with the Homeric worldview found in the Odyssey to the Cartesian and Newtonian natural philosophy, one finds the presence of some type of cosmology influenced by a concept of divinity. From attributing all natural phenomena to divine intervention to cosmologies that gradually limit the actions of a monotheistic God in the natural world to creation. The various changes in cosmology throughout history demonstrate the inalienable relationship between concepts of divinity and natural phenomena.
Homer's Odyssey provides the reader with an important, polytheistic cosmology rooted in direct intervention of the plethora of Greek gods and goddesses to explain natural phenomena. In the Homeric worldview, the cause of each particular natural event is personified, meaning that each event is related to the personality of the gods, who like humans are emotional deities. These deities, such as Zeus and Poseidon cause natural phenomena related to the clouds, the sea, earthquakes, storms, and the Sun. For example, Homer attributes storms to Zeus, “who marshals the stormclouds,” or power over storms. Thus, Zeus’s anger becomes the personification of thunder and storms in the Homeric worldview. Likewise, Helios, god of the Sun is enraged when Odysseus’ men steal his cattle so he calls on Zeus, who “hit the craft with a lightning-bolt and thunder.” The Homeric cosmology of divine intervention as a personified cause of natural phenomena continues in later periods of ancient Greek natural philosophy as well. The healing cults of gods such as Asclepius demonstrate a continuing belief in the divine intervention of gods in the physical world. Followers of the cult of Asclepius relied on temple priests to pray for divine intercession to heal the ill rather than diagnosing and treating illnesses. Cures through this concept of divinity derived from dreams, purging, dietary restrictions, and offerings to the gods, which were believed to miraculously restore one’s health. Indeed, one person afflicted with disease was healed through a dream in which Asclepius performed surgical operations to excise an abscess while another man’s his toe was healed by a snake during a dream. These healing practices undoubtedly have an origin in the Homeric concept of divinity as constant forces causing and shaping natural phenomena.
Future Greek schools of thought, however, moved away from divine causation of every natural event. The Milesians, Eleatics, atomists, Platonic cosmology, and Hippocratic medicine all evince elements of monotheism, atheism, and impersonalization in explanations of natural events. For instance, the Milesian worldview generalizes instead of focusing on specific natural events and transfers characteristics of the gods to non-personified entities, such as Anaximenes and Anaximander’s apeiron, the unlimited basic principle of the world that “out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them.” The Milesian divergence from the personified deities of the Greek pantheon cosmology of Homer also manifests itself in complete absence of the Greek gods, since they never appear in the writings of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. In fact, some philosophers, like Anaximenes, “determined that air is a god and that it comes to be and is without measure, infinite and always in motion.” Though they disagreed on what constituted apeiron, the Milesian cosmology moved toward non-divine intervention toward a reductionalism that endeavored to elucidate natural phenomena through epistemological shifts to empirical observation and logic. For example, Anaximenes’ explained cloud formation, rain, snow, and hail as a process beginning “…when the air is further thickened. When it is condensed still more, rain is squeezed out. Hail occurs when the falling water freezes, and snow when some wind is caught up in the moisture.” Anaximander and Thales also described natural phenomena in a process of interrelated natural forces in ways logical to them rather than attributing to personified deities the origin of earthquakes, rain, lightning and other natural occurrences. A similar change also arises in Hippocratic medicine, which focuses on the role of empirical observation, diagnosis, and Hippocrates’ belief that “human bodies cannot be polluted by a god; the basest object by the most pure.” Though the authors of the Hippocratic writings clearly believed in the Greek gods, they rejected the attempt by charlatan temple priests to attribute human malady to divine forces. Using reason and observation, the cosmology and origin of illness described in the Hippocratic writings shares the impersonalized causes previously mentioned in the works of Milesians, Eleatics, and other natural philosophers. Plato’s divine craftsmen described in Timaeus represents a similar, impersonalized cosmology that creates an orderly world due to the agency of a good god who wanted “everything to be good and noting to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over all that was visible—not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion—and brought it from a state of disorder to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder.” Plato’s concept of divinity is that of a creator who sets into motion an orderly world.
During the medieval period, concepts of divinity also impacted natural philosophy. Scientific inquiry and the reliance on Aristotle and other classical sources during this period focused on using rational approaches to understanding the world in ways that fit Christian doctrine. This led to Catholic philosophers of the Latin West receiving support from the Catholic Church to propagate Greek natural philosophy that did not directly contradict or undermine Christianity or theism. Philosophers of the epoch also embraced rationalism and philosophy to justify and prove unequivocally their Christian faith. God to the Christian philosopher was omnipotent, omniscient and beneficent, culminating in a being of ineffable goodness that created a world through which humans are made in His image. The influence of Aristotelian natural philosophy inevitably pushed medieval philosophers toward naturalism, but Aristotle’s Prime Mover as the first cause of existence was not impersonalized due to Christian beliefs on the nature of God. The process of applying reason to validate Christian belief also led to thinkers such as Anselm, who endeavored to prove logically the existence of God in his ontological argument. Anselm, started from an assumption that God exists and begins with a prayer, nevertheless appeals to the rational mind to establish God’s existence because that which no greater can be conceived must exist both in the mind and body. In addition, the doctrine of double truth attributed to Siger Brabant represents another attempt to reconcile Christian doctrine with natural philosophy, which was not durable because of its illogical premise of two simultaneously true statements regarding the natural world. By rejecting the doctrine of the double truth, Christian Aristotelianism under Thomas Aquinas and later medieval philosophers used reason to further faith, a trend already started by predecessors such as Abelard and Anselm. Thus, despite attempts to censor the teaching of Aristotelian natural philosophy that contradicted Christian doctrine at the University of Paris in the 13th century, the reading and study of Greek natural philosophy continued and the condemnation later annulled by acceptance of the teachings of Aquinas by 1325.
Furthermore, Cartesian natural philosophy relies heavily on the interplay between concepts of divinity and cosmology to illumine natural events. For Descartes, his Christian background and belief in God as cause in the creation and establishment of the laws of nature. Descartes describes in The World a God that continues to preserve the world but that the many changes in its parts cannot “properly be attributed to the action of God (because that action never changes), and which therefore I attribute to nature. The rules by which these changes take place I call the ‘laws of nature.’ Consequently, these laws of nature are the various causes of the change in the natural world since God is immutable and would not create a perpetually changing world. Descartes’s corpuscles, sub-sensible particles set in motion by God, and always colliding to create matter, so God’s role in the natural world is solely that of Creator. He also appealed to his concept of a God that has given humans rational minds as the evidence of superiority of reason to determine knowledge. Indeed, for Descartes God cannot be a deceiver, since, as he states, “This certainty is based on a metaphysical foundation, namely that God is supremely good and in no way a deceiver, and hence that the faculty which he us for distinguishing truth from falsehood cannont lead us into error, so long as we are using it properly and are thereby perceiving something distinctly. Clearly, Descartes’s conception of God is essential for Cartesian rationalism and cosmology.
Finally, the relationship between concepts of divinity and explanations of natural events becomes self-evident with an overview of the relationship between religion and natural philosophy. Concepts of divinity have a symbiotic relationship with natural philosophy since the two reinforce each other. Especially in the case of Descartes, or even earlier with medieval philosophers, God is essential in comprehension of the natural world because God is the source of Creation who endows humans with reason. For Homer and early Greek thought, the concept of a pantheon of personified deities causes every natural event, and is constantly intervening in the natural world. In each case, both concepts of divinity and natural philosophy have a reciprocal relationship that strengthens or builds on the structure of theology and cosmology. Often overlooked or misrepresented in history, religion and science never had an either/or relationship, since varying ideas of the divine have often been part of the furthering of scientific inquiry in the natural world.
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